I marched alongside my daughter with a different sign about a different nation. A nation that I also believe we need right now as well. My sign read: "I am here today because the U.S. welcomed refugees after the Holocaust. We are a Nation of Immigrants."
Sylvia is named in part after my maternal grandmother, Rachele Bunis Greenfield. In 1949, Rachele boarded the S.S. Marine Tiger in Hamburg, Germany with her husband, two-year-old son and 550 other refugee immigrants, en route to New York. My grandmother came from a large Jewish family in Kovel, Poland. When word of the Nazi invasion of Poland came, her parents encouraged her, aged just 16, to hide in a nearby forest. When she needed shelter from the cold, a Polish Catholic neighbor allowed her to periodically seek shelter in her barn and occasionally provided her with small scraps of food. My Grandma Rachele lived in hiding in that barn and in the local fields for two years, until the end of the war.
After surviving the war, my grandmother emerged from that darkness with nowhere to go. Her family and friends had been murdered. Her home had been taken over by Poles. She was weak and disoriented. She was homeless and hungry and defeated.
And yet, somehow she found the strength to keep going, to soldier on, to find help, to live. She spent two years in a displaced person’s camp in Braunau, Austria, where she met and married my grandfather (a fellow survivor), and gave birth to my father. Then, with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, their new family was able to get sponsorship and papers to come to America to start a new life.
The past year and a half since Trump began his incessantly hateful, xenophobic, racist and anti-semitic run for the presidency have been incredibly hard and stressful for many people, myself included. It’s hard for me to pinpoint which words and actions are offensive to which part of my identity--as a woman, as a mother, as a Jew, or simply as a decent human being. His hateful rhetoric has, however, forced me to strengthen those identities. And my identity as a child of an immigrant has grown stronger and fiercer.
When I see fleeing refugees, I think about my grandmother, how she emerged from the forest and the darkness of the Holocaust, grateful to be alive and still with nowhere to go. When I see immigrants desperately trying to get to America, I think about all the people whose lives will never be able to start over if we don't open our country to them. I think about their future children, because that's who I am. And that's who my daughter is. I was the hope for the future that my grandmother wanted so desperately to live to be able to see.
Many people were struck by the image of Sylvia with her “Nation of Hermiones” sign. Most people do not know how powerful it is that she is a fourth generation Holocaust survivor fighting the same kind of evil that nearly made it impossible for her to exist. She and I will continue to be a Nation of Hermiones fighting for our Nation of Immigrants so that other little girls like her will have the chance to live.
Naomi Greenfield lives outside Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and two tiny activists. She works designing online learning experiences at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After the election, she has been spending time and energy to learn more about being an anti-racist educator and to run for her local town legislative body, Arlington Town Meeting. She is a fierce member of the Resistance. She can also make balloon animals.
